Saturday, May 14, 2011

I realize I haven't posted on here for a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything with Solresol!

Upon compiling all of Gajewski's vocabulary into one file with all the possible Solresol words in it, I realized how much was actually missing. Sudre, however, has defined every SRS word with 4 syllables or fewer, in a fairly complete and logical way (as far as I can tell). Filling in the gaps with Sudre's words and keeping Gajewski's would completely disrupt the logical order of both of their grammars, and thus completely disrupt the learnability and logic of Solresol in general.

As a result of this, I have decided to ignore most of Gajewski's definitions and go with Sudre's complete dictionary. It's simply a matter of translating French, which isn't that hard, and his dictionary is so much more complete it would be silly to do anything else. I think, once I get it all translated, that I will take the liberty of redefining / updating his dictionary to remove what I perceive as redundancies or to include things that are left out. I can only do this once I'm done, of course, and have a complete, searchable database of his language.

On that note, I've been working on translating all of Sudre's dicitonary and putting it into an Excel file for useability's sake. I am currently done with all two- and three-syllable words, and am a little over 1/7 the way through the four syllable's (i.e. I'm done with all the 4-syllable words that start with "Do", and have started into the ones starting with "Re"). This is actually a LOT of words, and I'm quite pleased with my progress.

I feel like it'd be cool to actually publish a book form of this dictionary, along with an introduction and guide to learning and using the language. Of course, really I just want to be able to use it, but it seems I might as well put all this work into something tangible at some point...

Also, on the note of Sudre's definition vs. Gajewski's, the main point of conflict lies in the two-syllable words. Gajewski's words, overall, seem much more logical and practical (Sudre includes words like today, tomorrow, and yesterday, as well as both the masculine "Mister/Sir" and feminine "Mrs./Ma'am" (which can be expressed by one word with masculine or feminine accent), and he leaves out words like "with", which certainly deserve a place in the "little" words. I'm torn. I overall want to go with Gajewski's two-letter definitions, but one word in particular, "Sido" has me torn even more. Gajewski defines it as "Same" (opposite of "Dosi" (other)), whereas Sudre defines it as "How", which is a much more useful word, a word which Gajewski completely neglects. Right now I'm considering going with Gajewski's two-syllable word definitions except for Sido, which seems a bit illogical, but which might actually make the most sense. Of course, for Solresol to be useful as a comunication device, it seems to me that one should be aware of the words with multiple definitions and what they are, in case one runs into someone else who speaks a different "dialect". Which is kind of weird and awful, especially since one of the main ideas of SRS is to eliminate homonyms.
Oh well.

Bye for now, I'll try to get that dictionary up here whenever I get it done, which might not be for quite a long while. But look forward to that, imaginary audience :)